SXSW: Future Tech Moguls?

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The business of SXSWi is business: There are panels and attendees focused on such broad topics as disaster relief and the future of creativity, but the dominant theme is how to launch and grow companies. The Collegiate Digital Media Entrepreneurial Tournament is a good place to see this preoccupation in practice. I attended the final round, which featured three student teams being grilled, none too gently, by a panel that included Jim McKelvey, the founder of Square, an engineering director at Google, and executives at smaller companies. Here are the three last finalists, which were whittled down from an initial 64.

RentLingo, a Stanford University project, provides a social way to look for apartments for rent, as well as roommates. The site helps you know where your friends and their connections live, and provides demographic information (from gender split to interests to ages) for distinct neighborhoods drawn from the service's larger database. The ideal user is recently post-college and looking to move to a new city. As a New Yorker, I found the service to make perfect sense. The up-and-coming, affordable-but-cool neighborhood of the moment changes rapidly. This service came in third in the competition. The company's first monetization strategy is lead generation, I was told by cofounder Dan Laufer later in the day. (I ran into him at a PopMech phone charging station across town, where he was getting ready for another entrepreneurs' competition.)

Traverie, an entry from the University of California at Berkeley, taps into social networks for travel recommendations. The idea is have ready access to the insights of your trusted sources for tips on where to go, how to go, and when to go. The site will scour your Facebook friends' photo albums for travel shots, provide forums for asking and answering questions, and give you tools for building up a bucket list. How attractive this is may depend on how broadly your friends have traveled, and your goals. Traverie won't help you become the first person in your circle to ever visit a spot, but that's not important to everyone. #firstworldproblems

TempoRun is a mobile app meant to improve a runner's experience by using music to help him or her maintain a desired pace. The team was from Michigan State University. The app scans the user's music library, and assigns a tempo value, from one through 12, to each one. The app then allows the user to choose playlists grouped by playlist; it will also provide cloud-based music if you prefer. Company founder Joshua Leider (standing on the right in the photo) says that competitive apps speed or slow the tempo of a song to match your running pace. This app does the opposite, hopefully keeping the runner on the tempo of the song. The judges gave this company the win. My analysis: I'd use it, and the nice thing about it is that it is so focused. Like most successful apps, it tries to do one thing well. Leider spun out some potential social functionalities, which aren't hard to guess, but the company is wisely leaving most of that for later releases. TempoRun is only for iOS right now; the plan is for it to become available in mid-April.

Photo by Elina Berzins, a senior at Syracuse University's S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications Graphic Design